Re: Named node lists

[Matthias Clasen <clasen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> 
>    Doing a little quick research in formulating my response to Jany's
> last message, I realized that the support for named node lists in
> DSSSL seems rather poor compared to the rich set of operations defined
> for regular node lists.  Basically, the only operations available are
> a predicate to determine if an object is a named node list, an
> operation to extract a node by name from the list, one to get a
> regular list containing the names of the nodes (in the same order as
> the named node list), and one to do name normalization.
>    Wouldn't it be nice to have an equivalent of (node-list-reduce)?  I
> think James' (copy-attributes) function could be considerably simpler
> if this were available (because the "attributes" property of an
> element node is a named node list).  Heck, even having the simple
> (named-node-list-first) and (named-node-list-rest) operations would be
> great, as most other node-list functions could be built on top of
> these.  Perhaps we could work these in as "DSSSL2" additions?
> 

No need to do this. The standard contains the following (found in
the introduction to clause 10):

The named-node-list data type is a subtype of the node-list data type
that represents a node-list each of whose members has a string-valued
property that uniquely identifies the node in the node-list. 


This implies that all operations on node-lists are applicable to 
named-node-lists as well.

-- 
Matthias Clasen, 
Tel. 0761/203-5606
Email: clasen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mathematisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg


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